


The Wound Is Where the Light Enters

by archea2



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: F/M, Family Feels, Fluff and Angst, Forgiveness, Luther friendly, Redemption, Romance, Step-Sibling Incest, Twins, Vanya friendly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-20
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-02-16 01:41:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21499744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: Five jumps them a few months back, to a time when Reginald is still alive, Luther is (supposedly) on the moon, and Leonard Peabody is on the prowl.A small step for Five, a big, life-changing step for Luther and Vanya.
Relationships: Luther Hargreeves & Reginald Hargreeves, Luther Hargreeves/Vanya Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Luther Hargreeves, Past Allison Hargreeves/Luther Hargreeves, Reginald Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 24
Kudos: 97





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've been of two minds about posting this, with Season 2 getting close. Then I thought, oh, what the heck.
> 
> Title quote courtesy of Rumi.
> 
> Oh, and Reginald is Reginald, inevitably, but he is not 100% sadistic either. (The fic is not about forgiving him, though.)

First, the pain. 

To Luther, spared physical agony most of his life (give or take one bullet), it comes as betrayal. His hybrid form fumbling for a _twice_ -adequate quantum self, now aligned with, now dead against Five’s calculations, every pore roaring up. It tries to savage itself apart, only to reconvene around the weight in Luther’s arms, a counterweight to his urge to drop the hands on either side of him and scatter himself into a swarm of particles, small enough to not feel the pain. 

Vanya’s hand he barely feels. And yet.

It makes no sense, that all of her should be so inert, yet something of her keep in touch with him - against logic - against the very pull of gravity. Her hand should be dangling down, but there it is. That soft patch of sensation, just above his knotted shoulder blade. 

Then he _is_ torn apart and pieced together, man and boy, ape and man, flung onto some cool hardness. Sense memory drops next. Marble, lit by the silky gold of ceiling lamps. The house, whole again - the hall - its stately penumbra visible, as Luther struggles to his knees. 

Vanya’s hand still clings to his neck.

“Number... One? How can you be - _Number_ _Seven_?” The voice, honed to a point, pierces through Luther’s daze. “Is that her in your arms?”

Dimly, past Klaus’s gulped-out “Papa?”, he tries to stand to attention. His arms and shoulders know the drill. But he can’t - not with Vanya still entangled in them. _Yes_ , he tries to say. _Yes, it’s her, please help them fix her, fix us, forgive me, I’m so sorry. Dad, please. It’s so messed up, and there’s no plan._ All he can do is kneel and stare - at the man, the living, not yet self-slaughtered man - standing at the top of the stairs. Reginald Hargreeves, straight-backed and tall as an I, as ever. 

_Captain my captain_ , something in Luther cries out, aching for direction. 

When he opens his eyes again, Dad is at the rim of their broken circle. Taking his time taking them in. Close enough that Luther can see the deep-set eyes, one still framed under glass, pausing on him. His breath shrinks. 

And then - against every odd, against the phantom pain still enveloping the sum of him and Vanya - Sir Reginald smiles at him.

“Good job, my Number One.” His voice is the warmest Luther ever got from him. “Splendidly done. Now hand her over to me, and see to your siblings.”

* * *

There used to be many things for him to believe.

That _Spaceboy_ was Dad’s secret name for him, Dad’s wink and reward for a cult of space born of Luther’s cloudy mindscape (Dad telling him (no, Pogo, it was Pogo) that he’d once travelled in the air, back when they hadn’t even taken the little wheels off most planes). 

That Luther would fly, too, one day, not just drop from high roofs. 

That he was a man of faith among prodigals. Dad’s man to the bone, keeping to his loyal orbit.

And that if he did, Dad might, once again, come sit on Luther’s bed and watch over his sleep, like when he was a little kid.

(Yeah, yeah, the cameras. So what? It still meant the soft give of his mattress under Dad’s presence, before Dad pressed his shoulder good night. Luther never grudged Diego Mom’s lullabies, did he? Never grudged Klaus Ben’s vigils, Five Vanya’s snacks, and was there himself for Allison from her first grazed knee to that final, tear-ridden ride to the airport. Why grudge him that crumb of touch?)

All he has to do to earn his father’s love is hold out his arms to him.

Only… his arms are already claimed.

He looks down at Vanya’s hair, pooling across his arm. It’s been so long since he last saw it down - she took to tying it back in her late teens, a dodge from comparisons with Allison’s crown of glory. Now it cascades around her exposed face, the kohl-soaked eyelashes belied by the last poignant hint of childhood in her round cheeks, and when Luther moves his eyes to that pale face, vision trips sight. He sees her again behind the hermetic glass window, her cheeks running with tears and mouthed pleas; and, hard upon this image, he sees _his_ face locked up in a space helmet. And they come together, these memories; they make one, like two photographic slides meeting tightly in one slot. 

The loneliness. 

The paradox of having to breathe in a tight space while crowded from every angle by an infinity of absence. No one there to hear your breath. No one to share it with. The pang, the panic at times.

Other voices reach him, all male dark lower tones, warped and diluted by Luther’s panic.

“... FYI, Dad, we _caused_ the whole kit and kah-boom-dle!”

“... swear to God, Luther, you turn coat now…”

“... lock, drug and mindwash her, to say nothing of your _asinine_ gift to her of a sound instrument…”

“I can’t,” he says. And for all that he only produces a wisp of sound, like the mountain that gave birth to a mouse, his brothers drop into silence. (Allison’s grip on his hand never hushes.) 

His father’s gaze wheels back to him. Luther knows the exact second when the stone drops and the ripple starts, wiping out the shine of approval. Disbelief, gloved in shock, nursing disappointment and - at the very bottom of the gaze - a shadow, unfamiliar, unnameable, that could be Sir Reginald’s sorrow.

“I, I did it before,” Luther breaks in. “Klaus is wrong, Dad. We didn’t cause the Apocalypse - _I_ did.” He closes his eyes against the next truth. “You were not there, but I did what you would have done, and the world ended.” 

Outside his closed eyes, the only sound is that of creaking wood, the sighs and grunts of a house that was always too old for its vocation. Then, another.

It grows fainter as Luther opens his eyes again and watches his father blending into the dusty-gold light, his long shadow trailing up the stairs. Tap. Tap _._ The shadow melts into the general gloom; the sharp pat of an umbrella’s end can be heard in the gallery - along the shelves - heavy with books that have their backs turned to Luther, too.

Tap.

Tap.

* * *

A hand tries his shoulder, his arm. He can sense them around him and yet at a remove, a close-up that’s too far away to be touched. He thinks, with abstract surprise, that the hand is Klaus’s. Diego’s stricken face hovers nearby, and a paler patch that must be Five’s. They’re all a bit floaty, a bit loomy. But something still grounds Luther among them - frail, but there; close, closer, closest, sticking to him in the waste land of Luther’s desertion. 

Vanya stirs in his arms, and Luther rises slowly; walks up to the nearest ottoman. 

“Look after her, okay?” he says, once he’s laid her down gently on the old velvet. He shuffles back to a stand, finds their faces again, stricken and silent. “You have control,” he says to no particular face, adding “Better that she doesn’t... you know....” and, with a blurred gesture to himself, turns and heads for his room.

Stairs, gallery, door - Dad’s steps, ironically. But a one-man journey now.

* * *

His room is no shelter. 

There are dust sheets muffling every shape of table and chair, up to his beloved planes, now white ghosts looming under the ceiling. Of course, Luther thinks. He’s not meant to be here. The year Five took them back to - that has to be one of his, Luther’s, moon years. Dang.

It feels... uncanny. Like he no longer belongs here, after he spent, what, a quarter lifetime? blending in with this house like a tame chameleon. Luther looks, and the room looks back at him, wintry and blank and so, so shrouded. He pokes a finger at the nearest sheet; watches the dust motes rising in the slashes of light. His window is shuttered.

Then he hears a natty _clack-clack-clack_ of heels and turns to see a beaming Mom. 

“Luther? We weren’t expecting you home so soon, dear. Here, I’ll take these off.”

“Mom,” he says, and something in his chest wells up, massive, raising the orphan that was never quite engulfed in the man. He feels lost and found. She smiles brightly at him, and it takes the last morsel of strength not to drop to his knees and bury his face in the generous fabric of her skirt. “Oh, Mom... “

But the room is cramped. She bumps, smiling on, into him as she reaches up for the shrouded plane. Clumsily, he backs into his record shelf. And the Academy shudders.

“Oh my,” she says. He’s caught her before she pitched forward. “Darling, you _have_ to remember - softly does it. You need to channel that strength, not - let it slop all over!”

The house shakes again, and Five pops his head in - literally - at the door.

“Don’t come in!” Luther warns, steadying Mom 

“Five, is that you? How lovely! All my boys come home to roost!” 

Five, true to self, comes in. As he does, the house rattles again, hard, as if caught by the scruff of its neck - hauled - shaken - by a force greater than its rightful owner. The ghost planes collide. A record slides out of rank and across the floor. Mom tuts. Five jumps - gratis. Luther gapes.

“You have to come down!” Five yells. “She’s freaking the bejezus out!”

“How can I make it better?” Luther yells back. “I’ll only freak her more! It’s what I freakin’ do, Five!”

“Language, dears.”

“You don’t get it,” Five says, lowering his voice but compensating with extra cut-glass enunciation. “She’s not upset because you’re here - she’s upset because you’re _not_. She can’t see you, so she’s putting two and two together, which is more than I can say for you. She thinks she’s killed you, Luther!”


	2. Chapter 2

Luther’s eyes must have registered his _oh shit_ , because Five nods curtly and jumps him to the hall without a by-your-leave.

The hall… is not the horror show Luther fears, blast from a recent, yet-to-come past, when its walls and pillars hit the crash zone under Vanya’s cold fury. The pillars stand. The walls are upright. But Five’s statuesque portrait is lying flat on the floor, as are the antlers, a memo of Dad’s trophy hunting days (before he turned to babies). One horn tip - last seen wearing an impaled Pogo - dangles forlornly. Luther looks for Vanya.

She is sitting at the center of the zone, her face pushed down on her knees, between her arms, and she’s crying. No - she’s wailing. Luther always thought _wail_ was a gross exaggeration - bookish gross - good enough for Ben’s tales of romance, but who the heck utters “a prolonged high-pitched moan of grief or anger” in real life? Not he, for sure. At best he sobbed, and his sobs were half barked and clumsy. Unpractised, after Dad’s iron rule of silence in a house where Luther’s record collection was only begun after Vanya left and Dad relaxed his grip. But now? Wail, wail, wail. And it scares him, Vanya’s long cries of agony, feeding her power back in some mad Möbius loop, while her siblings stand by helpless and soundless, save for the house creaks. 

“Vanya!” he calls loudly. 

(Luther breaks things. It’s what he does, when not deluding himself that he can be the family glue. And he stepped out so he would stop breaking Vanya, but apparently broke her _in absentia,_ so maybe the least he can do is break her away from the loop.)

She flinches alert at his voice. And then she’s staggering to her feet, relief seeping into her face only to morph into anger, battling with her puzzlement that there should be anger. He sees it, and, like a tunnel vision plunging into her unquiet self, he sees why. Sees what she sees - sees the Luther who used to prise the lid open for her upon surprising her in the kitchen with toast and a jar of peanut butter, and the Luther who blocked her trachea. Who clapped at her first, tentative rendering of _Au clair de la lune_ , a relic from their first nanny (poor Mam’selle); who later rekindled her childhood trauma; who smiled; who scared; who, when the fingerboard on her violin snapped, repaired it with patience and fingers nimble from years of mixing with glue and wood; who baited a bear-faced assassin away from her; who marched his brothers straight to her; who, back when Allison got too busy with photo shoots and teenage pageants, let her sit on the strong curved planes of his back during push-ups; who let her alone (alone, alone, alone).

All of this, the ripple on her face tells Luther. It eddies down Luther’s chest, on to his heart, and it leaves a resonance behind. She says, “You’re here, oh, you’re here…”, her voice bruised and crushed, and suddenly it’s up to Luther to resonate for her. The sensation comes upon him, that he felt before, squashed in a telephone booth with Allison and a lost notebook. Then, as now, there was that… that _attuning,_ as if Luther’s soul expanded, grew out of its own confined cell until it met with another closed curve, and the overlapping between them was made into words. Two souls, one truth.

“I lost part of myself, and I never healed from the loss,” he tells her. She flinches, again.

Allison says, “Luther, I don’t think she can -”, but stops when he waves her still, forgetting to marvel at her voice redux.

“I feel unnatural, even now. And angry. And my anger is justified, because he betrayed my trust, he manhandled me against my will, shunted me out of sight when I was… vulnerable... he... he made sure nobody could reach out to me, and I’m mad at him for it. But… but the anger has nothing on my grief. Only my grief has gone solid-like, like it’s petrified now and if I let it melt again, pour out of me, there’ll be nothing left of me in the end.”

Her eyes, all nerves and silver, widen. Then they blink shut, and when they reappear, they are their quiet velvet brown. “Luthier,” she murmurs.

“Luthier?”

“It’s what I called you. When you… when you fixed my violin for me.”

“...Oh,” he says. He can sense her exhaustion, but she’s tipping sideway, and Five and Klaus are leaping with equal zeal to catch her limp body. Luther half turns; finds himself nose to nose with a black-browed Diego. He waits for the barb, but all Diego says is, “What was _that_?”

“What?”

“That!” Diego repeats, waving one jazz hand round Luther’s face. “The… talking thing! What, you a mind-reader now?”

“No! Yes! I don’t know, okay?” And Vanya’s distress must be have vaporized, sort of, or their collective jet-lag, because Luther can feel the warmth gather at the back of his eyes. Great. Tearing up in front of Diego - just what he needs. “More like... I was talking, but she was talking through me, with my thoughts echoing hers. Part of them, at least.”

“Like a Venn diagram,” Five interjects, to Luther’s grateful nod. He’d forgotten that equations were their common lingo.

“But your power is strength! B…” And Diego, uncharacteristically, cuts himself short.

“Brute strength,” Luther completes wearily. “I know. You guys need a hand over here?”

Klaus looks up from the ottoman, where he’s been propping Vanya with care, persistence and Dad’s entire stock of Moroccan cushions. “Nah, we’re all good and dandy. Am I to take it Team Kamikaze is dismissed?”

“Too early to say,” Five answers. “What’s the date?”

“Ah, deja vu, old friend. Hi again!”

“Can’t see a newspaper around,” Diego says as he stretches his stocky form down on the opposite couch. “I’ll take first watch, you guys can step outside and check - _Klaus, get off me_!”

“You wish,” Klaus says, huddling against Diego the Human (Pin)Cushion. “Here, Ben, take the foot.”

 _Ben_. Dear god, they’ve already forgotten Ben.

“I’ll hold the fort,” Five tells Luther, shooing him to the door. Luther suspects that time traveling, or in their case time tiptoeing, has taken its toll on him. He’s got used to Five pulling faces, but this one looks mightily like Five fighting a yawn. “You do what Diego said - for once.” After this, he flumps down on a seat with finality and no finesse whatsoever, crosses his stockinged legs, and starts snoring.

“Come on,” Allison whispers, linking their arms. “They’ll be fine. Ben will wake Klaus if necessary, and Klaus… is not the type to spook Vanya. Let’s go do some scouting.”

* * *

The City air envelops them, infused with barley-coloured light, noises and pollen from the crabapple trees that line their street. It reaches up to Luther’s cheeks and around his naked fingertips; swirls Luther’s head with the loud yips of dog walkers and hot-dog sellers. When he became a recluse, Luther forgot that geography of contrasts - how their very still, impeccably ordered house stood amidst that hearty riotocracy bartering hot-dogs even at 9 a.m. 

“Wow,” he says, taking it in - the gaudy smells, the loud colours. It’s still there. All accounted for: the shops, with their old-boys’ names - Chester’s, Cameron’s - the passers-by, with a morning bounce in their steps - even the skyscrapers, running into the sky at one end. 

“Yeah,” Allison says, laughing, nudging him forward. “Five did get the where of it. But when?”

And then she gasps.

HOLLYWOOD STAR MISSING AT AIRPORT!

“I PUT HER IN THE PLANE MYSELF” AGENT SAYS

OR SO THE RUMOR GOES… BUT WHERE?

“Damn and blast,” Allison says, making a dash to the newspaper stand. “And blast and damn and… oh shit, Luther!”

“Eleven months,” Luther says, noting the date. They stare at each other in a daze of light. “I was on the moon. And you…” He gapes wider as she starts crying. “Allison? Allie, talk to me.” More light, limpid-sharp. “Wait. Is now before you… and Claire… I mean, are you still...”

DISTRAUGHT HUSBAND PATRICK

… Oh.

He puts his arm around her, a shy, slow-gestured move. Takes her, half stumbling, half falling, to the nearest street bench. She babbles over a fresh welling of tears while his gloved palm strokes her hair. 

“Before I ruined it all. Yes.”

He says nothing; strokes her head in a dazed if earnest motion. She’s as beautiful as ever, with hair like crinkly sunlight and those strong cheekbones that give the lie to her vulnerable mouth. But her tears are only half for him. The other half is all Claire’s: is relief, burning her cheeks like a blush. 

Leading has never been so easy - or painful.

“Call Patrick. Tell him it’s all been a mistake, that you were taken ill or something, had to make a stopover. Go home” - but already, _home_ is two places (like their split timeline) and hers feels to him like a foreign country - “and Pogo will book you a flight. A private one.”

“No, Vanya needs me, I can’t run away from her, I -”

“Right now, Vanya has five people looking after her. Claire has one.”

“Luther,” she says, and there’s a change of tide in her voice. She’s never been one to dodge a low blow, be it delivered in love, or return it. “Luther, what happened at the house?”

“I… I told you.” He swallows against his lost expectations. The recent past is still upon them, when he sat by her bed and vowed himself to her wounded self, but the wound has been closed. Gently, he touches her throat. “You should know - you of all people. You were there when I did it before. The night I talked to Claire.”

The dressing clings to her skin at first, reluctant, before it comes off easily, baring the impeccable brown skin. No scar. No trace. Her tight voice the only memento.

“I thought it was just you and me.”

“I thought it too.”

“But it’s not. It’s you and others, too. Luther, was it my fault? Because I did my best to keep you all to myself?”

He doesn’t answer. Years of cherishing their bond, of making it into a fetish, another gold locket hoarding the bright untouchable past of two children’s hopes. A failed rendez-vous, a dance they never danced. It became an excuse to keep himself away not just from “a girl” (Diego), but from any touch in the normal course of human affairs. He bundled himself up, and not just in coats. He kept three or four layers between himself and the people he loved.

And yet, even then, there were moments... short intuitive moments... when he got a glimpse of what made them kin, deep down. Their common strengths, their shared flaws. And then he flashed it all back to them, with bristling antagonism, because he didn’t know any better.

_Let me guess, you’re going to save the day._

_I know she’s important to you, so don’t make me do this_.

_Is there any way to silence the voice in your head that screams out to be the center of attention?_

When he climbs up from the muzzy depths of reminiscence, she’s gone. Home, where he ought to follow her, if only to check on Vanya and the others. But he still feels dazzled. There is so much to process, and to do it here, in the sun, with countless human people buzzing through their day feels right. If he has… whatever that skill is, that lets him merge with others, then the street is an open-armed venue. 

So he chooses a slow walk home, pausing now and then to bask in the sun, the warm vibrant atmosphere, and the closer the house, the slower his steps. It’s not that he doesn’t love the others. He does. But the house… the house was a layer, too. If Luther goes back inside, will he have to wear it again? Haul it up on his shoulder like a stone overcoat, with its guarding lions and all its secret caches filled with lies, and Dad sulking at its top? Bear it and wear it, until it wears him down?

There’s a little Arts and Crafts market in the adjacent street. A mere handful of booths, but alive with laughter. Before he knows, Luther’s steps are taking a detour. Just five minutes, he tells himself. Just - a respite, before he joins the others again.

He pauses at the first booth and its display of beautiful carved objects. Luther feels a rush of fondness. As a child, he was an enthusiast for wood and paint - found consolation in their solid touch and the beauty of piecing things together and seeing them make a whole, like the Academy at mission peak. He puts a tentative finger to a miniature duck, takes it back at once. “Sorry,” he says to the air. He’s probably not meant to touch the goods.

“Hey,” a voice says to the left. The booth owner is standing next to him, staring at him so intently behind his dark glasses that Luther shuffles self-consciously between one foot and another. But the guy only smiles. He’s not much to look at on first glance, his own overcoat making him look bulkier than he is. (Luther can sympathize.) But he has a nice smile.

“Very, uh. Very nice,” Luther says. He means the duck. And the smile. And the other duck, to say nothing of all the ducks lined up on the top shelf. “Do I sense a theme?”

The guy chuckles. “You would know,” he says, jocular. 

“I… what?”

“Well, you’re a collector, aren’t you? Oh, sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude, only I've always been a fan of yours so I couldn’t help it. Spaceboy, right?”

“No longer that,” Luther says, his own smile on the wane.

The guy is still staring at him, his head cocked infinitesimally on the left. “I’m sorry,” he says at once with a wide grin. “I hope there hasn’t been any trouble - I was really chuffed when I heard about you going to the moon. I’m a small guy doing small things, but it’s one thing I’ve always wanted to do - travel. And be a hero, of course, if my dad had let me.”

“Pod!” a girl calls from the next booth. “Stop flirting and get down to business!”

The guy ducks his head, looking shy, and a rush of warmth gathers in Luther. He _can_ connect after all - and people can connect with him right back. There he is, the massed bulk of him, and this guy is talking to him like Luther is normal. Impulsively, his hand goes out.

“Luther Hargreeves. Nice to meet you, Pod.”

“It’s not - it’s just a silly nickname. But, eh. You’d know about that too, right?”

Pod takes the little duck and nearly hands it to Luther - then, on quick second thoughts, puts it back. “I say, would you like to come back tomorrow? We’re doing an auction for the annual fundraiser. Custom pieces, all that. I… might have something that interests you.”

“Oh well, I’m not sure -”

“No obligation,” the guy says. “No, really.” He smiles, again, and Luther waits to see if the Venn circles will do their trick, but they don’t. All he gets from Pod is nil - like Pod’s emotions know better than to let Luther access them. Oh well. Practice makes perfect, and all that.

Which brings back Vanya to his mind. It is not right, that he should be away when she wakes up, and so he shakes the guy’s hand, possibly a little too earnestly, seeing how the grin contracts.

“I’ll think of it,” he promises, and takes off on large fast strides towards the Academy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A reminder that Luther only saw Leonard once and briefly, when Vanya brought him home and Luther’s mind was focused on the First Apocalypse timeline. He was at home when Diego, Allison and Five accessed Harold’s police file (and photograph), and he was at Allison’s bedside when Diego, Klaus and Five found Harold’s corpse. 
> 
> The kudos and comments on chapter 1 made me a happy author! Don't hold them back, guys.:) They're A-1 author fuel.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys. Guys, I'm so, so, SO sorry to be updating late in the...month? But I live in Paris, aka Transport Strike City these days, and the last weeks have taken their toll on me. 
> 
> This chapter was supposed to be longer, but I'd rather split it in two and end it on a happy note in these pre-holiday days. I promise I won't keep you waiting too long for the next part!

“Happiness,” Alfred Hitchcock once and famously said, “is a small house with a very large kitchen.” 

Reginald Hargreeves, to whom happiness was (a) a theoretical goal, (b) pending on order, punctuality, and oatmeal for seven, happened to disapprove. He built a Juggernaut house with a bare-bones kitchen, but the kitchen did prove the heart of the house - for all that it was manned by a non-organic cook. To the young Hargreeves it was a room of their own: a no-Dad zone to be stomped, scuttled, zapped or sashayed into, according to their respective numbers and moods. 

“Come in, _entrez_ , _kommen Sie rein_!” Klaus’s voice greets Luther, now making his way to the large table. It’s punctuated with place mats - plural! - and clouded with more adult voices than it has ever been. “Come and watch the Coffee Monster drink from a soup tureen! Admission price only fifty cents, ladies and ghost a quarter! No, big guy, not here. You’re sitting on Ben.” 

And cackles in high glee when Luther jumps back, clattering the chair.

“It’s tea,” Five says matter-of-factly. “Dad’s poison. Guess Mom forgot to restock on coffee while you were on the moon.”

“Sorry,” Luther mutters.

On imperceptible second thoughts, he looks for Vanya while speaking; and Vanya looks back the tiniest instant, then ducks her chin. She did that as a kid, but Luther no longer chalks it up to shyness. Stupid, he tells himself, stupid, stupid. _Sorry_ won’t do the trick. There’s a time to take after Dad and be a man of few words, and there’s a time to talk, only now’s not the time, not with Ben manifesting on the empty chair and saying “Hey, these waffles actually smell solid-like!”

“The times, they are a-changed,” Klaus singsongs. 

“You can’t say a-changed, that’s not how a-prefixing works!”

“The times, they are a-pre-fixed!” 

“Nice one,” Five says, “but no. Not by a close margin.” He moves his eyes to Vanya, still ducking over her cup, and his steely-reedy voice softens. “Vanya... went through a lot, and still has a lot on her plate. What she needs -”

“Training,” Diego dives in, clock-reliable, and from Five’s killer glance, not for the first time. “Look, I’m as open to psychobabble as the next guy. But if you want her to channel her grudge, her, her _screw you and the world you rode in_ , nothing beats hard, clean, physical training.”

You’d know, Luther thinks. Doesn’t say anything, though. Goes through his waffles, and waits for Vanya to remind the Great Hargreeves Public that she’s got both feet in their yard, to say nothing of her elbows on the table. That she’s not a ghost despite the spooky all-white suit. Waits for Ben to pitch in, too, instead of letting Klaus try and feed him eggs (a noble cause). But they hush, and the other three keep squabbling, and then Allison comes in and confides to the air, “There’s a plane in four hours”, and Luther’s blood is _hurrying_ to his head. He’s had it. This is not what families do, and they’re meant to be a family. Joining hands against time and tide. 

“What do you want?” he directs to Vanya, who starts at the rough-voiced address. Luther plods on. “Because we can’t start making you a _she_ again. That was...”

“The way the mooncake crumbles,” Klaus says when he pauses.

“... our mistake in the first place. Talking over you. So talk to us, Vanya.”

“I…” 

_How do I glue what snapped, what broke, what I helped break?_ Luther’s eyes plead, and Vanya’s eyes falter in response; dart, an arrow of guilt, to Allison standing on the kitchen threshhold; burn with a hot flash of emotions as clear to Luther as the radiation he spent four years recording on a Geiger counter. _How do I make up for the wound, the gash that tore at you through her, because we all know she’s your Best Beloved?_

“What do you want, Vanya?” he repeats, holding her gaze while Diego fidgets in the corner of his. (Do his brothers recall those shy knocks, the brown eye peeping under the brown curtain, into the terra incognita of their rooms? Does Allison?)

“I... I don’t want you, any of you, to get hurt. Because of who I am.” 

“And?” Diego presses, because Diego. 

“And... I want to be who I am.” Vanya takes a gust of a breath. There’s life, flowing from that hot core up to her cheeks, into her hands, suddenly steady as she puts down her fork. She turns between Luther and Five, Allison and Klaus, her anxiety not yet frantic, gloved in resolve, but adding another layer of shadow to her eyes. “I know you have to see me as some kind of monster, but I never wanted to be one, just as I wouldn’t want any of you to give up on being who you are.”

“I have killed innocents so I could breathe fresh air,” Five says quietly. “I’m more of a monster than you will ever be.”

“Yeah! So you blew up the moon, so what? You should see the other guy, the one haunting the second-floor loo - got his fin-de-siècle _bidet_ clogged up - took a lit candle to investigate - almighty boom! Now _that_ ’s a gassy end.”

“Klaus! Not at mealtimes!”

“I’ve ruined things,” Allison tells Vanya. She has walked up to Luther’s other side, her elbow a line of ghost warmth at his. “But, you know what? I still think there’s a way I can - rumour them better. And I’m going to keep looking for it, sister, and so are you.”

“We can practise together,” Ben offers, glowing into being again. Klaus tends to switch him off, when distracted by food or inappropriate breakfast chitchat, but he’s trying. Bless him, is he trying. “We can both work on connecting with our inner Chthullus.”

“Preferably not in the kitchen, though.”

“Yeah, and the gym is right out. Al is a grade A neat freak.” 

“You’re all of you being very kind,” Vanya says, and it’s strange, how she still sounds like her mousey self even as she stands up and lifts her chin, her voice the last to catch up with the new Vanya. “And very, very dumb. We know there’s only one place in this house where I can... slip in practice and not bring it down with me.”

“What? Oh hell, no.” And Luther is standing, too, before he knows it, knows that he is towering over her; and so he sits again, the chair groaning under his weight. “Not on your… not on anyone’s life, organic _or_ mechanic, yeah Diego, I heard that. We are not doing this.”

“We are. I know I blew it last time, but I was, okay, I was…”

“...Hulk-level angry at the past.” Apparently, Klaus has taken upon himself to be the family explicator.

“Yes. I think it can take a not-angry me, but I’ll feel safer if I’m under lock.”

“We’re not locking you up again!”

“You don’t get to make that call, Luther!”

“Nor do I get to stand by and let one of us suffer forceful isolation all over again.”

“So you’re willing to endanger all of them for my sake?” When he does not answer, she puts one hand on his shoulder, letting the tapestry of muscles play under it, and says, “It was the right call before, you know? I’m not okay with it, but that doesn’t mean you did wrong. I was an emotional mess who had just… and you had no guarantee I wouldn’t lash out again without notice. If we do this, if you train me, then I need to know you’ll step in and put me out again the moment I get off track.”

The kitchen clock, an appliance dating back the Early Crooker epoch, gives a rusty tick.

“... Luther?”

“Meet me halfway,” Luther tells her, and stands up again. 

They all do, and - miracles of miracles - follow his lead. Down they go, not quietly as mice: a ragtag, boisterous crowd of six in his back. They nearly sweep Pogo off his bare feet when their exit slots into his entrance, and - a miracle squared - Vanya doesn’t so much as blink an eyelash at the sight of their old retainer. A sliver of Luther’s mind thinks _tray, food, Dad_ , but the sum of him is already tackling the secret stairs, two steps at a time, while they jostle one another in his wake. The corridor looms up before him, the door. Then - the other door.

He doesn’t think even he is up to Reginald-brand hinges. But the hinges are subservient to the lock. And the lock defers to the spindle wheel, as it did on his space shuttle, courtesy of Hargreeves Engineering. So Luther puts both hands on the wheel and calls for every morse of strength. He makes his forearms his tools and put his back to the task, every nerve and tendon crying for mercy, his effort a mute roar. The sweat runs into his eyes, but still he levers his gorilla self - levers it against everything the vault stands for, that defies his tongue, but not his arms.

It feels like an entire sheet of muscles is being wrenched from his flesh, but it’s the lock giving in, after all: made helpless, when the wheel remains in his hands with a deafening screech, and the door stays open.

“There,” he tells Vanya under the veil of sweat, “like this. Your very own training gym.”

“Well played, _Luthier_ ,” the explicator says, clapping his palms together.

“Yeah, that’s… half a plan. Now what, big guy? We up and leave, and hope she doesn’t blast the foundations away?”

Luther is ready and willing to answer. Five, true to self, is quicker.

“For a knife expert, Diego, you’re really the blunt tool in the box. She can’t blast anything, she can’t _do_ anything now for lack of noise. Her power relies on sound waves, remember? So we need to find a source of noise for her to work with, but one that’s not associated to traumatic events. Thus, not her violin.”

“It’s at home, anyway,” Vanya says. She is already standing in the vault, a gleam of white in the penumbra. And looking at Luther with her lips parted, like she’s trying to say more but her words can’t make it past some daze of disbelief. “Oh my god, it’s Friday! I’m supposed to have students! I need to call and cancel my lessons!”

“Forget about the lessons, Vanya! Luther’s right - look, there’s an inside, and the walls are strong enough to absorb whatever you throw at them. And there’s an outside, and we’ll be there for you. If it gets too much, you just step out. If you need us, we step in. No more glass. No more solitude,” Five says, his voice reverberating in more than vault space. It fills a void in Luther’s chest, already made warm by Five’s approval. Even when he fucked up, big time, big scale, Luther level, Five never blamed him. In fact, once they got past Luther’s emergency Dolores blackmail, he can’t remember a time when Five gave him the sharp end of his tongue.

“Yeah, we will,” he says. “Five, could our voices be enough? If we talk to her?”

“Debatable,” Five says. “Her ear is plied to music.”

“Ooooooh!” And Klaus makes a little leap, clapping his heels this time. “You know what that means, Ben? Diego?”

“No! Absolutely not! We are not resurrecting The Corpsies!”

“We are totally raising The Corpsies! Come on, Ben, where is your _esprit de corps_?”

“Do I want to know?” Five asks Luther, who shakes his head.

“Trust me, you don’t. Klaus’s solos alone would have been enough to trigger a seism.”

“Your records,” Allison says quietly, addressing him. “She… really loved them.”

“You did?” Luther redirects, genuinely surprised. From inside the vault, the old Vanya bites her lip. The new Vanya half nods, half shrugs. 

“You did,” Allison insists. Her voice sounds a little strained to Luther’s ear; still finding its footing, in all likelihood. “You asked me once if he would lend you his player, and I told you I was the only one who could borrow it. That’s when you asked Pogo if you could study music. I… think they comforted you, the records, sort of. You should have one now.”

“I had no idea,” Luther tells Vanya. "I'm so sorry, Vanya. What was your favorite?”

In response, Vanya smiles a little. Only a snip of a curve, but visible, palpable almost, and Luther's rush of pride feels like a gift from her mouth to his soul.

“ _Hangin’ Tough_."

“Holy crap,” Diego says. “Do I really have to stay for this?”

“ _And_ do the New Kids’ dance!”

“Be right back,” Luther says, and lets the memory of her smile steer him all the way up to his room and the muffled, silenced record player in it, and back again.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. It's official: my timing is atrocious.
> 
> 2\. But thank you, Season 2, for reviving my Luther/Vanya love. (And adding Diego to the mix, but that's another story.)
> 
> 3\. I'm still going on the assumption that Luther was too distraught to register Harold Jenkins' name when Five muttered it in episode 1x10 (after the Academy was destroyed). All the previous times Five mentioned Harold, Luther was absent. Bear with me!

“And a one, and a two, and a one-two-three!” says Klaus, and Vanya, giggling - giggling! - sweeps him off his feet into an (admittedly jerky) somersault mid-air. “Woo-hoo!”

Diego’s cheer is sparser, a dry “If the old man saw us now”. It comes from his recumbent position on the floor, due to his taking a break after an hour spent throwing Ben’s old plushies at the designated trainee, only to have them slammed back home full pelt.

(The slamming part, as Luther earnestly informed him, was a necessary protocol before he let Klaus volunteer. The first two plushies imploded like popcorn, drenching them in cotton smithereens.)

They didn’t dance, much to Luther’s relief. He does not trust Klaus to hold off on the _organ grinder’s monkey_ jokes, and dancing (like jerking off or, at times, sobbing from the heart) is best left to his night schedule. But they sang. That is, Klaus did. Ben contributed a hum. Three verses in, Diego did some weird undulating routine with his arms and wrists and, when stared at, said “What, you never heard of rhythmic gym?”. 

There was no more mention of Allison’s flight and Luther, happier than he’d ever been, took a step back and watched Vanya coming into her own. In fits and starts, granted. On tippy toes and a strict safety protocol. But… strongly. And that’s something Luther can relate to: strength, caused by a change so organic that it gives your already twisted DNA another turn of the screw - turning your chest feral or your eyes the palest silver. 

If, a few years ago, you’d asked Luther what grieved him, he would have answered: not being able to tell Ben _I know the feeling_. But Ben is back. And they can both be here for Vanya. Luther’s heart bulges at the thought, while he kneels down to change the record.

“Fun fact,” Ben tells him, smiling. “The name Luther comes with three meanings. In German, you’re leading an army of people. But in English, you’re a lute player. And in ancient Greek…”

“C’mon, Van! Once more unto the high wire, babe!”

“... you’re free,” Ben concludes. “ _Eleutherios_.” 

Luther wants to ponder this, but he is feeling too… tipsy? exhilarated? for the task. When Klaus traipses off for snacks, having finally touched ground, Luther feels as if his brother’s vertigo was extended to him by proxy. He wonders, briefly, if this is the Venn diagrams playing up, or whatever his other power is supposed to be. But then Vanya staggers out of her “gym”, her face brilliant with sweat above a shirt half untucked, half clinging to her lithe form.

“What time is it? I feel like it’s been hours since we began.”

“You did great,” Luther assures her, before he glances at his watch and blinks hard. “Wait, it’s six already? How come none of you called quits? You must be famished, Vanya!”

“I did great,” Vanya repeats with a happy tremor. Her voice is playing a game of catch with her breath, but she says “I _feel_ great”, and Luther is blissfully, idiotically proud all over again. “I could play these records forever!”

(Horrified muttering from Diego’s corner.)

“Here,” Luther says on a grace impulse, pushing the record player toward her with one hand. “Keep it. Until you can… or want to… you know. Your, um, violin.”

“Oh,” Vanya says, her cheeks drowned in heat. “Are you sure? You love that player.”

“Actually, that might be a good idea.” Five has been such a quiet figure, not one to partake in a song-and-dance, that his breaking into speech startles all of them. “You’ve spent years bonding with your instrument, Vanya. I bet it was your only outlet for your frustration - until the typewriter.” Diego snorts, and Luther sends a frown his way. “I don’t think you should dip back into it right away. Not until we get more data about you.”

“You’ll need the book.”

“Vanya, I could quote your book chapter and verse. Your book was my bedside reading all the years I was sans bed. And it’s not gonna be enough.”

“Not mine,” Vanya says, pushing her hair behind her neck. “Dad’s. He had - well, has - that notebook. Remember? Leather-bound, great big embossed monogram? It has specific entries for each of us, Leonard got hold of it, don’t ask me how, and then I found it at his place and that’s how I knew. About me. It had all that stuff in it, I only browsed the surface.”

“Then we need to get it from Dad,” Five says, and segues with “no, Diego. Diego, down. We’re not adding patricide to your eurhythmics. Luther…”

“Sure,” Luther nods eagerly. He still feels giddy, but it’s a good giddy, bit like when he slipped outside of his shuttle and took that first, _lightweight_ step on the moon. “Anything. I’ll just, er -”

He is interrupted by Klaus, freshly arrived with a heap of snacks piled in his arms. “His desk. Bottom left drawer,” says Klaus, his eyes not quite meeting theirs above the snacks. If Vanya is self-conscious, Klaus looks untypically constipated. “Black casing inlaid with gold.”

Any other time, Luther would cross his arms, dig into his memories - a mole to Klaus’s clenched butterfly - and exact a confession from his shifty brother. Now? He claps the prodigal on the shoulder - Klaus tilts forward - and takes the steps up two at a time. 

He’s got this.

* * *

Turns out he hasn’t got this.

Dad’s study is the same - still lined, stuffed and peppered with Dad’s exotic gewgaws, here to imprint every square inch of space with The Presence. Luther ambles up to the desk. The books on it - and the brass statuettes, and the inkpot, teapot, the dead salamander - how they irk, now. Not even keepsakes. _Pawns_. _Trophies_. Won by Dad in the thick of ventures too mysterious to be shared over a smile or a child’s round-eyed gasp, even Luther’s. (Who loved that inkpot. Might have got his own writing itch from staring at it during debriefs. Later dedicated a poem to that inkpot, fuck it.) 

So why parade them? Who to impress, aside from Mom and her featherduster? 

Luther feels a sudden urge to touch. Mess up with Dad’s grandstanding. Teach him that anything doubles its worth when it’s made into a gift, a sweet hyphen between _you_ and _me_ , instead of those frozen little mirabilia. Still, the urge fizzles out before it has reached Luther’s arm and too-big hands. Instead, his legs start moving; taking him around and behind the desk, to squat on his hams as he jerks the last drawer open. On the... 

...nothing to see. Luther stares. Then tugs the next drawer. And the one above, sharply, and all their counterparts on the right side. 

Empty, empty, empty. 

“Is it this what you’re looking for, Number One?”

The jolt brings Luther’s head, still questing under the desk top, up and hard against the wood. He pulls himself away; turns to face his father, standing on the threshold. Sir Reginald Hargreeves is impeccably rigged up in his hat and long coat, his eyeglass firmly entrenched. A bag at his feet, his hands still empty, save for...

“You’re leaving,” Luther says, the pain in his skull matched by a lower, duller throb.

He struggles up as Reginald sighs, his face sharply patient. 

“I would have thought this obvious, Number One.”

“Why?”

(What algorithms have taught Luther about dads: the older you grow, the closer they ought to get. Because that’s when the gap between your ages starts to close up, gradually, like a wound healing. When you’re ten and they’re thirty, okay, that’s a tough one to bridge. But then you’re twenty, and they’re forty, meaning they’re only double your age! And then (he used to reckon on his fingers) if, at some far, far away mark on the road of time, you’re fifty and they’re seventy, why then, you’re practically equals!

But in Sir Reginald’s case the maths worked backwards, kind of. Luther became five, became ten, seventeen, twenty-nine, whereas Sir only grew more anachronistic: a cross between vintage and steampunk. The second millennium rolling off him like water off a duck’s back. To Luther, it felt as if his father was aging widdershins.)

“Why are you leaving us?” Luther repeats in his despair. “We need you - even after everything. ”

“I don’t have time for this,” Sir says, though it sounds more as if he is arguing with himself. “You and your siblings have loudly, repeatedly informed me that my course of actions with Number Seven was a mistake. Possibly. Life is a hopscotch of chances, and to stake the safety of an entire planet on a rumor and a bottle of pills was a brittle leap, I’ll grant you that.”

“Brittle,” Luther says, the word too solid in his throat until his anger dilutes it. “As brittle as screwing up my DNA? So you could keep your pet champion at your beck and call? Oh no, wait. You did not keep me. You did what you do best - you carted me off to a cold chamber and gave me the silent treatment. Four years. Four years, dad!”

“I let you have your childhood dream. I’d have thought gratitude -”

“No. No, you didn’t. You…”

He has never viewed his father at such close quarters. When a child, there was regulation distance; Dad a bystander, Luther exiled at the leading edge of action. But now? Now they are face to face. And the strange thing that happened before is happening again - the chord in Luther’s massive chest resonating with another chord, drawing words from Luther that fit two souls, two experiences.

“The freak. The hybrid. Outcast, stranded, having to camouflage who I am under layers and clothes and more clothes and layers, living isolated lest I’m detected...”

He opens his eyes. “Did I disgust you so much?”

“You have no idea of what you’re saying.” And there it is, that sorrow held so far away in his father’s eyes that their black pupil might well be another, minuscule chamber of confinement. But Luther doesn’t care. _One small step for a man_ , he’d read and worshiped in Armstrong’s biography. One small step, and he is wrenching that notebook from unresisting hands. 

“Go away,” he growls. “I don’t care what your next plan is. But I’m done with your silence, and your secrets and, and the sight of your back wherever I turn. We’re a team, now. We’re a family. And we deserve more than being a bunch of footnotes in your book.”

He waits, but his father is once more walking past his reach, Pogo shuffling behind him to grab the bag. Luther makes himself still, his neck rigid, not turning. Instead, he plumps the notebook down on the desk - his father’s monogram slammed to its wood - and opens it. The pages spread themselves apart obediently; and Luther is ready to browse them for Vanya’s number when he spots another on top of the page. 

_Number One (ctd)_

_Excellent organic progress. Muscle to fat ratio on the rise. A natural at weightlifting, boxing, following. Still lacking in strategic skills (see page 29)._

Curiosity is a solar wind, mobbing Luther from every angle. He knows the cautious road. Had it taught to him during training, same as Five and everyone else - don’t rush into the unknown, don’t take stupid risks. Don’t open Bluebeard’s book. But the urge is stronger - to find even a shred of praise in that cold, flawless writing, whenever Dad put them under his monocle and anatomized them. He goes back to page 29, then to page 22, 16 and 7, then all the way back to page 1. 

_Baby #2 reported to have broken his bed fence in his effort to_ [the remaining clause inked out in black] _. Needs an extra bottle per meal. Interesting, but what use is strength in a dunce or a maniac? To be watched._

Huh. Luther can’t remember a time when he hadn’t been Number One, though it makes sense that Dad would have redistributed numbers at some point according to usefulness. Luther wonders briefly which of them was Baby _#_ 1\. If Diego, he’ll never hear the end of it.

He reads slowly, losing track of time, Vanya and the others forgotten in that great thirsty rush of curiosity. Dad’s notes: all variations on a theme when it came to Luther. Strong, driven, reliable. A perhaps favorite (Luther’s heart trips over _perhaps_ ). Too sensitive, though. His sensitivity to be curbed, channelled, to be hardened into single-minded devotion to the Academy. Himself dosed with physics and exact sciences the moment he showed a love for music and poetry. His greenhouse tryst nipped in the bud. His grief over Ben’s death snubbed or harped upon until it became the snow falling over Luther’s heart, day in day out, keeping it whole only by leaving it chilled and silenced, a coffin in its own right.

The shorter the entries grow, the more this turns into a leitmotif. Every round between Luther and Diego, every nosebleed and decibel of it archived with a note of self-congratulation that jars Luther - why would Dad rejoice over instigating a split at such odds with his “Unite!” team anthem? It makes no sense. Not, at least, until Luther comes to the last entry for himself, a week after his fatal mission. Dad’s writing for it is less steady; no longer minding its p’s and q’s, because Dad’s nerves, never the best players in any tense situation, must have been playing up.

_Transformation complete. The Greeks called_ pharmakon _the thing that was both remedy and poison, cure and corruption. Thus with Number One. I wonder if this will affect his other skill, one so close to Number Seven’s in that it channels his deepest empathy as hers does her emotions. But no. Safer to keep him in ignorance and isolation, just as I kept him separated from his twin_

Luther’s mouth opens, stupid, as he stares down at the page.

_as I kept him separated from his twin_

_separated_

_as I kept him_

_his twin_

And, as if to enact the words and make them punch Luther’s mind more forcibly, the next page is torn out. Luther grabs the book and shakes it with frantic hands - in vain. The page is either destroyed or with Sir Reginald out of the Academy. Only a half sentence left, staring back at Luther.

_separated_

He pushes his face into his too-large arms, his mouth still open and choking.

* * *

When Luther finally steps out, he steps into a cat’s-cradle of shadows. The night has crept up on him, unawares. There is no one downstairs - of course. There never is.

“Wow, you still here?” 

Steps, stomping, clacking. Diego’s boots, Mom’s heels. She is putting a parcel into his brother’s arms - food, probably. There is an expanse of floor between them and Luther, there are pillars, stony, sofas, unmoving. Luther’s throat struggles; only produces his own query.

“Where are the others?”

“Gone.” Diego shrugs. “We thought you’d gone rogue, or something - you never came back. Pogo’s dropping Allison at the airport, along with Dad.” He glances up from under his slouch; cracks his knuckles a little self-consciously. “She, uh. She said to say goodbye, and that she’d call. Sorry, man. Should have fetched you.”

Something stirs under the numbness, the now familiar strain between himself and another. Weaker, barely touching the hollow in his heart. Still... under his brother’s embarrassment, mirroring his own, Luther can sense another emotion that has to do with loss and love, the gulf of one, the harsh of the other when no longer reciprocated. If he wanted, Luther could prod the gulf. But what’s the good of it? Loss is loss. He’ll prod, and so what? Diego will be leaving in a matter of minutes. Like before. Like Allison, Klaus, Five, Vanya.

How could he even think he’d keep them close this time?

_I kept him_

“Yeah, don’t bother. I’m going out.”

“Darling, what’s wrong? You haven’t eaten your supper, and I made that beef -”

“I’m fine!”

“Hey, don’t talk to her like that!”

“Like what? Like the brute I am?”

“Screw you, Luther! I’m playing nice here, but if that’s how you swing...” 

Luther tosses the book at him, too fast, not looking. It hits Diego’s chest with a thud and an “Oof” before Diego glares daggers at him - par for the course - while Mom exclaims “Oh, my!”.

“Knock yourself out,” Luther says. It comes out meaner than he intended, but he’ll take _mean_ over _numb_. “I’m out.”

“So that’s your attitude? We’ve been, what, ten hours back and you’re quitting? What happened to helping Vanya?”

Vanya. Oh god, Vanya. Vanya’s face coalesces before him, vibrant and vulnerable as he last saw her, but then it recedes - Vanya’s gone, too. And Luther remains trapped in numbness, his mind still wrestling the shock; still feeling as if there is too much of him and only half of him at once. He can’t look at the book. The book has orphaned him all over again.

“Luther, dear…”

“I am One,” he says and starts laughing, and never stops until he is out in the dimlit street.

* * *

Everything looks different in the dark. Luther thinks it’s down to the transformation: chimps do pretty poor on night vision and spend most of their nights resting and nesting. It was one of the reasons Reginald gave for curtailing Luther’s missions until he sent Luther on a planet eternally surrounded by space night. Now the street lights feel fuzzy and piercing in turn; if Luther looks up, they fill his eyes with golden floaters and disorient his steps. Good. Luther wants to be giddy and on the move, never stopping because if he stops he will feel the pain again. Odd, how that phantom severed twin hurts -- how it feels to Luther like amputation, like Dad taking away Luther’s integrity all over again.

He stumbles into a lane, then another. Dimly, he thinks that he is retracing his steps to a place at least half-familiar. Ah, yes - the booths. The little market, where there was laughter and a smile. Where he’d been known and acknowledged, called by his old name. The April night is still cold, and Luther orbits towards the booths’ fairy lights, his steps dragging. Perhaps…

“Luther?”

“Pod,” Luther says across a jolt of relief. He looks into a face already familiar. “I… I came for the auction.”

Pod’s laughter is kind as he moves his eyes, no longer shaded, to Luther’s.

“You’re being an early bird, pal. We’re just checking the premises - the auction proper starts at noon.”

“Oh,” Luther says. Sometimes he feels as if he is still catching up with the Earth schedule. There is a time for waking, and there is a time for sleeping, but they tend to get mixed up when you live in an all-night environment. “Sorry. Um, is it all right with you if I stay a bit?”

“Actually....” And Pod looks around to the handful of craftsmen locking up the booths. “I’m afraid we’re done here. But tell you what. The night is young and I’m up for a nightcap if you are. There are a few good places around, or we can go to mine if you like? There’s that little piece I mentioned, that you might like. I could show it to you, so you don’t have to come twice.”

A nightcap. A drink. Suddenly Luther thirsts for one, and then some, the pit inside of him calling for a more joyful numbing. But is this a good idea? The last time he drank was a tale of much sound and a little fury, and he’s not sure if it is quite safe to renew it. On the other hand, the odds of Pod’s place being a drug den/rave den/blind date den seem limited. And Luther is alone, and he is thirsty on multiple counts. 

Pod waits, his smile and offer unruffled. 

* * *

“It’s nothing much,” his host says modestly, while Luther marvels over the small plane carved in dark walnut, its wings polished to an browngold shine. “But I know you used to collect them, so... it's for you.”

The first gift Luther has received since he became a recluse. He cannot speak.

“Here,” Pod says, prising it loose from his fingers and setting it on the coffee table. “I’ll wrap it up for you tomorrow. Well, today, technically, but I think it would be safer if you slept off the rest of yesterday here. The couch is a fold-out and we can add a stool or something for length sake, no bother. Have some more scotch. Come on, just a snifter. I want to hear more about the moon - oh, is something wrong?”

“You are so nice,” Luther wants to say, only it comes out as a garbled sob. 

“Whatever it is, you can tell me. Hey, it’s okay.” And Pod is slinking into the couch next to him, a warped echo of Klaus in another life, another timeline. “Drink up. Drink, and then you can have a nice good cry, and tell me all about it.”

The thing is, Luther has never in his life had a cry that qualified as good. His tears tend to sneak up on him, slow-moving, until the dam between his heart and his cheeks gives in and they flood him whole. The sour of salt adds to the sour of liquor in his mouth. He inhales past the taste, motions to his glass. How did the day turn so dark, so fast? Why did the music stop?

“I am here,” Pod repeats, almost a chant. He is holding Luther’s glass to his mouth, more liquid pouring into the pit. “Tell me. Tell me what’s going wrong.”

And Luther must be trying, because he can hear his own voice forming words even as he tries to remember how you confess a grief. He tries to focus on the words, but the room is swimming before his eyes, only the clink of glass to glass visible. He talks, and talks, and at some point it grows dark again, but there are still two of them in the room. At one point he is talking and the sofa is sagging under him with a groan, unless it is Luther groaning, but Pod says not to mind. Luther talks, and when he passes out mid-word, he is feeling raw all the way from the back of his throat to his empty stomach, but it’s a nice raw.

He awakens the next morning to the smell of buttered eggs. His head is dim, while his stomach is clearly of two minds about its own content. The last time Luther felt so disoriented was the rave aftermath, when he woke up with an extra head on his shoulder, drooling over it. Thankfully, it's only him lying on the couch, though he can hear Pod clattering about in the near kitchen.

“Here,” Pod says, re-entering with a large plate of eggs. “Scrambled, am I right?”

“Hmmm?”

“Your eggs. You favour them scrambled, no salt, two turns of the pepper mill.” Pod grins, balancing the plate carefully on Luther’s now vertical knees. “At least that’s what you said in 1998. And I should stop talking.”

“No… no, that’s okay.” Luther’s stomach has made up its mind, letting Luther dig into the soft-solid heap. The eggs are okay, too. Easy on his throat. “You’ve got to be the only person who recalls how I like my eggs. Well, with my Mom. But she’s programmed to, so... “

His voice peters out, but Pod only nods. It’s not unpleasant, eating here. Having someone to talk to. Pod’s flat is medium-small, its space bumping into angles everywhere ; but Luther is aware that living in a place with frosted glass chandeliers and three en-suite parlours can tweak your sense of perspective. He is more startled by the lack of private belongings. Even at his most autocratic, Dad graciously allowed them to decorate their rooms as they chose, dealing out a per diem according to rank and number. There were catalogues to choose from and Mom never questioned their taste, even during Diego’s short but intense affair with blacklight lamps or Klaus’s pinata craze. Pod’s rooms look… impersonal, for all their Grandma Moses pictures and that floral couch they’re sitting on. But who is Luther to judge?

“So, you read my interviews?” he asks instead, groping for a topic. 

“Chapter and verse,” Pod says at once. He laughs diffidently. “It was a bit of a personal matter to me, as I told you.”

“You did?” Luther goes for a memory, resurfaces with a headache. “Sorry, I’m afraid last night's, uh, a bit of a blur.”

“Ah,” Pod says. He smiles, a millisecond register of sharpness, but then he pats Luther’s knee tenderly. “Never mind, then. I was a hopeful kid, then. Turns out I’m still hopelessly hopeful as an adult. Just... when you’ve been looking for someone all your life…”

The words kindle a brief echo in Luther. Vaguely, through his headache, he wonders if this is his - sensitivity, skill, however you name it, perking up. If it is, then Luther should pay attention. Because it means that somewhere, in some subtle capacity or other, his experience and Pod’s are lining up, and Luther is no longer One.

“Yeah?”

“This will sound crazy,” Pod says, but he is speaking with a new firmness and Luther has met with enough lies in his recent past to know that right here, right now, Pod is telling the truth. “But I was born on the exact same day as you. October first, 1989. And my father… kind of made it clear to me that I was no son of his.”

Luther frowns, trying to parse this. “You were adopted?”

“I was. And my dad, when he lived - my dad saw me as a parasite.” There is a resentful edge to Pod’s voice, an anger barely masquerading as rancour. Again, the words spark a resonance. But it is flat; a little pale, a little off-key. It doesn't have the depth or colour of Luther's usual vibration. Still, Luther will grab at any likeness. 

“A burden,” Pod says, his smile back to wistful. “Fathers, eh? And I thought, if that makes any sense, I thought, what if he’s right? What if he was saddled with me at my birth? I never felt I belonged with him. And then I heard about _your_ dad, and how he’d adopted all these kids who shared my birthdate, and I thought - perhaps he can tell me!”

“Wait a minute.” Luther’s memory is proving faithful after all, perhaps triggered by Pod’s rising excitement as he delivers his tale. “There was this kid… we must have been fourteen or so...”

“You got me,” Pod says, his grin morphing into self-deprecation. “In more sense than one. You came straight to me, remember? When I leapt over that barrier. It was like you’d known who I was, right away.”

Luther does not quite remember the scene, but he sees no reason to doubt Pod. There _was_ a kid. Who begged Luther's father to take him in. And his father refused, cruelly. Made sure by his tone and wording that the kid knew he was ordinary.

 _Made sure the kid knew he was ordinary_.

“Oh, but he was right,” Pod tells him quickly, as if reading his mind. “I _am_ ordinary. No power whatsoever. But here’s the question - how could he tell? I mean, now is now. When I look at you now, Luther, I see a superman. No two ways about it.”

“Oh, well…”

“Whereas I’m Joe Average. But us kids? Didn’t look that different. So how could he tell what I was? I’d done my research, you see. Every microfiche, every yellowing scrap of newspaper I got hold of, they all told the same story. Forty-six children born across the world, only seven in his Academy. So how could he tell? Unless he knew who I was? And if he did...”

Luther is feeling giddy again - parched from the scotch, and with less than his customary share of proteins. But Pod’s voice is relentless. 

“If he did, it's because he was the one who gave me away. Once he knew I was no use. And then I thought of my name.”

“Your name?”

“Harold. Old Saxon name. Means army leader, or power, depending on the etymology.”

_In German, you’re leading an army of people_

“My father hated the sound of it,” Harold says softly. “I can’t think of any reason he’d have given it to me.”

With Ben’s voice surging up and Harold’s words eddying down his mind. With the vertigo born of a torn page, a perfectionist father, a confession of keeping two boys apart. Wishful, disoriented, avid for a resonance that doesn’t come, swayed by a logic of names. Doubtful, trusting. Alone and very much not wanting to be. 

“Oh my god,” Luther says, because hope is the Hargreeves way to go.


	5. Chapter 5

Luther loves paprika and whole milk in his eggs. The milk soothes him, a callback to their breakfast of seven and the sweet backdrop presence of Mom pouring it into their oatmeal, her love made visible, organic-like, against Luther’s better knowledge. The paprika is an acquired taste. When in space, Luther’s morning diet consisted in cubes of bacon processed and thermostabilized by Hargreeves Enterprises: a state-of-the-art breakfast but a very bland one, as he confessed in his one and only televised interview. (The space suit doubled as body camouflage.) 

The eggs Harold scrambled for him have milk and paprika in it. 

“Like I said,” says his host, wide-grinning. “Big Spaceboy fan.”

Luther smiles too, dips back into the dish. It still feels surreal, that he should have woken up today only to be conjoined with his birthmate, lost and found (and the loss found out about) in less than twenty-four hours. Luther risks a peep at Harold. Who looks nothing like him, but that’s fraternal twins for you, Luther reasons himself. He ransacks his brain for something polite to say, to inquire - Harold knows all about him, but Luther’s idea of Harold still orbits only around a few wooden ducks, a flowered couch, a name that mirrors his own. Still, Harold is nice. His eggs are nice. And it is so very nice to be appreciated, cosseted with food and relentless attention. He should ask Harold… he should ask…

“So,” Harold says before the question has shaped itself in Luther’s mind. His tone is eager, pressing. “What do we do? If we want to be sure. I’m no scientist, but I’d say a DNA test is in order, don’t you think?”

 _Nice_ fizzles out as Luther puts his fork down, fork-blocked by nausea. He glances down at his hands - ungloved, the tawny hair almost feral against the paler skin kept from the sun. He must have peeled his mittens last thing last night, Luther’s ritual so his pores can breathe while he sleeps. Did Harold see Luther’s hands and think nothing of them? Of his fingers, gnarled before their time, the leathery skin a glove in itself? How could he? Or is Harold exceptional enough, for all that he is average, that he can love Inside Luther when Luther struggles to like him at best? 

Luther finds himself aching for certainty.

“Won’t work,” he says. The next words have to be pushed past the knot in his voice. “My DNA… has been altered. I thought I’d told you last night? What my, what our father did. To save me.”

“He tainted you,” Harold says softly. “He _violated_ you, Luther.”

The way Harold phrases it makes it sound nastier than Luther’s mind ever let him frame his father’s act. Luther has to look away from the eggs, even as he says, “He had no choice.”

“Maybe.” And Harold is standing up, his hands pushed into his pockets, heading to the window. The back of his head rigid, before he turns again and stares at Luther with unfazed brown eyes. “Or maybe he knew that if you _ever_ wanted to know, _ever_ quested for your twin, this would make it impossible. Think, Luther. Think of the irony, him burying that truth into your very blood. The ultimate offence.”

Luther’s head is spinning. 

“I mean, you know him better than I do. Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong, perhaps he’s not that cunning...”

“He is,” Luther says, because what else? “He is, and I worshipped him for it.”

And Harold is back, is a close-up, one hand attaching itself to the back of Luther’s neck. It feels clammy, like Harold has been perspiring on the sly even though his window is open to the cool of the day. A bird caws in the near distance. “But you are strong,” Harold murmurs. “That hasn’t changed.”

“Yeah.” And the anger is rising again, massed and fast-moving like a tide. Luther thinks back to that torn page. To thirty years of being told to look out for his family by the man who orphaned him of his closest kin. “Yeah, I’m that.”

“The strongest,” Harold murmurs, and Luther clings to the praise, to the anger that nurtures it.

“And that means we can face him, you and I. Make him answer to us - for what he did. For all the pain he put us through.”

“He won’t,” Luther says dully. “You don’t know him. He’s inflexible.”

“Hey.” And Harold repeats that clammy smile, patting his neck softly, once, twice. “You don’t break what’s flexible, pal.” 

Luther’s heart is too big for its beat, the rush too quick to his head, a red visor before his eyes. Luther is the impulsive one, but only when given a stimulus. A sting - a provocation. Alone he could never force Dad: Dad’s silence a law unto itself, even in those rare golden hours under Dad’s favorite tree, the two of them reading or writing while the tree rustled on its own. Luther had tried his hand at poetry; at framing a sonnet or a roundelet, their tight poetic forms a way to contain the turmoil of his emotions. Dad had approved; had even bestowed one of his precious books upon Luther. Now he sickens under the memory.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I, uh, I don’t think he’s coming back any time soon. Can’t we just…?” 

_Be pals? Be brothers? Get over his silence and talk, be close, closest, be closer than arm’s length?_ He waits, but Harold only drops his hand. Harold is still here, but now he is making himself a close-up that can’t be touched. “I get it,” he is saying, gentle, wistful. “After all, you’ve got all those brothers and sisters already - what’s one more to you?” 

“No! No, that’s not -”

“They’ll be missing you as I speak.”

“No,” Luther says, heart punched and squeezed by heartbeat, sadness a systole in and of itself. “Not likely.” 

“And, hey, maybe it’s not even me. What’s in a name and all that.” Harold turns away a little. “Just, I wish I knew for sure. I would have killed to have a brother like you, Luther.”

“Harold…”

“Too bad I’ll never know. Ah, well.” And Harold tries to smile under the perspiration. “Darn, I’m letting the daylight burn. They better not start that auction without me!”

Luther tries not to let _me_ graze him.

He is getting up too, suddenly conscious of his size in that dollhouse of a flat. There is a chimney in Harold’s parlour. It goes nicely with the wooden shelves and the folk art ambience, but that’s not true wood burning behind the glass. It’s one of those synthetic logs that can glow for hours and never truly consume. It’s not giving off much heat either, not that heat is a seasonal must these days. Luther rubs a shoe to the floor, tries to remember where he’s left his coat. 

Harold retrieves the coat, holds it up. “Think of it?” he insists. “Just think - just picture yourself having the upper hand on him. Trust me, I’ve been there. It feels _good_ , that upper hand. Like a million fresh-printed bucks. And we would know for sure.”

“Hmm…”

“Here,” Harold says, taking his hand. His fingers envelop Luther’s with a brief warmth, and then they brush away, leaving a piece of paper. “My number. Why don’t you call me, and we’ll talk some more - or meet for a drink? If you’re not too busy.”

Busy. Luther tries the word for size. He was never busy on the moon - he moved from hour to hour with the same slow-mo focus he did on the white dust outside his shuttle. It was peaceful at times; space letting Luther feel its pulse, drowsy and dark, a one-beat lullaby. Most of the time it was agony, that limitless monotony. This past week has been a nuthouse romp for sure, tripping Luther into some pretty bad moves, but it did keep him on his toes. It kept him warm, sort of, even if the warmth came from Diego’s fist or Klaus rubbing him the wrong way. _We’re hard cookies_ , _us lot_ , Klaus had once said, embracing his role with both arms as the family jester speaking out the truth no one cares to hear. _Hardgreeves to a fault._ But rub two flints together, you get a flame. 

He looks at Harold’s placid face and thinks, _Diego would be stuttering. Five, swallowing. Klaus… would be Klausing, loudly_. And he wants to stoke up the anger, so that when he sees Harold again he can make a bonfire of it and coax Harold close, close, close, raise those emotions in Harold’s face that Luther can tell himself are for his sake too.

He pockets the number. 

* * *

Another brilliant day, the light breathing into the air and rippling across in every shop window as they step into the street, Harold’s arm steering his. Luther is of two minds about the light - like he’ll never have enough of it, and wants to flee it and hole up in his room’s shadow, the atmospheric dusk of his 80es records. He walks Harold to the auction, but then Harold vanishes behind one of the booths and the gathering crowd stares at Luther, who left his gloves at Harold’s. 

It gets worse when a little kid stage-whispers “Look, Mom! The BFG!” and the mother takes a pinched sniff at the air surrounding Luther and shoos her kid over to her other hip. 

“You could do with a shower, Big Friendly” a voice says in his back and Luther jumps. But it’s only Five sidling up to him with a styrofoam cup in each hand. One is half empty. Five keeps the other.

“Did you buy these before you spotted me?”

“You never know what tomorrow will bring,” Five says over a slurp. 

“Really? I could have sworn that was your line of work.”

“No longer. What are you doing here, Luther?”

Luther wavers. He is, by nature, a terrible liar, but he is also a scientist who knows that true knowledge is changeable and multisided and no longer Reginald Hargreeves **™**. It is obvious to Luther that Harold is his lost brother, but he doesn’t _know_ it, and neither does Harold. So maybe it’s not quite fair to let out a secret in which Harold has a vested interest, until his twin can take his rightful place at his side with no fear of a second jilting by the family. At least that’s what Luther thinks Harold wants. 

And Five is still waiting.

“Looking for my twin,” Luther says. Mumbles, really, though clear enough for the crowd. One guy scoffs, fostering guffaws, plural, and then Five is saying, “My brother could _chop_ your backbone into _matches_ , morons” and the guffaws cease rather sharply. Luther raises his head, but Five has already blinked them out of the square. 

“...I’ve spilled your coffee,” Luther says mournfully.

“We can get some more.” Five sighs, raking a hand through his fringe. “Diego barrelled home this morning to show me Dad’s book. He was concerned.”

“Well, yeah. That shit’s hardly _Cheaper By the Dozen_.”

“No, idiot. About you. You walked out on us, Luther.”

“No, no, I didn’t, I…” _I went down the stairs and Allison had left, Diego was going, Vanya going, Klaus gone. I thought the past had mortgaged the future_. “I didn’t think you’d notice.”

“Really? Because I wouldn’t trust Diego with a quadratic equation, but this was more of a two plus two feat, deducing that you were upset. I would be too.”

_I would be too_

One-syllable words, light in sound, heavy in meaning. Five’s radical isolation reaching out to Luther’s stint on a dead celestial body, its white dust the result of another collision between Earth and disaster, matching Five’s ashes-to-ashes landscape. Luther swallows. 

“You saw that torn page?”

“I did. I’m sorry, Luther.”

“Do you… do you think Pogo knows? Who my birth mother was?”

“Dubious. You know Dad, he kept a watertight hold on his baby shopping spree. The Commission might be able to tell” - and Luther’s heart jolts, scalded by hope - “they have eyes and ears everywhen, but we can’t quiz them right now. I’ve no idea if the Handler was alone in rooting for a Vanya-brand Apocalypse or if that was the company line. If not, if I did them a solid by setting the clock back and moving their goals forwards, they’ll owe me. And I’ll pop the question. I promise, Luther.”

There is a quietness to Five’s tone, as there was when Five sat with him in a car and urged Luther to make the best of his life. Quietness, Five renouncing acerbity, is his rare and resonant attempt at love. At least that’s how it resonates in Luther, but before he can open his mouth, Five is back to pragmatics. 

“Anyway, I thought I’d do some reconnoitring. But nothing seems amiss. No Temps hoodlums that I can see. And Vanya says Leonard never called or booked a lesson with her, which I take as proof that Klaus’s sticky paws really started that shitshow in the first place.”

“Vanya,” Luther says, and suddenly he sees yesterday’s Vanya, happy and colouring as she took his gift. He promised he’d be here for her. And he left her waiting for the book that was meant to help her. “Did you see her? Is she home? Is she good? She's not mad at me, is she?”

“She’s home - that is, her home.” Five pauses, still scrutinizing Luther’s face. “Actually, she was wondering if you’d drop by this afternoon. She wants to ask you something.”

“Oh,” Luther says. “Is that… are you sure I should see her alone?”

“We both trust you not to lock her in her washer, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Right. Jeez. Uh, I’d better go home too, then. Get that shower.”

But he doesn’t move. And neither does Five. The Venn diagrams hum softly in Luther’s chest, making it easy to understand Five with his arms slack at his sides, an awkward lollygagger.

Most of the City hasn’t changed since he left, as if Reginald Hargreeves, that early settler, had imparted upon it some of his own durability. But Five has (as has Luther). And Five doesn’t know if his changed self can fit once more among the drowsy streets, the flyby honks of cars, the curl of smoke that only signals the nearest hot-dog cart.

“Hey,” Luther says. He can hear the growl of voices in the distance, where the auction is taking place. Where Harold is. And if Harold is his natural brother, shouldn’t Luther do what he does best, stay with his kin of choice? But Five is glancing at him sideways, and Luther finds that he cannot choose. “Remember the Game Park?”

Five lights up imperceptibly. That is, one side of Five’s mouth trembles up. “The one where you sent the puck _through_ the bell of the high striker?”

“The very same.” Luther takes the murderous preppy by the shoulder and turns him gently sideways. “It’s still here. And the City Lake. You know, it’s been literally years since I visited them. First I never had the time, and then…”

“ _Aliquando enim et vivere fortiter_ ,” Five says softly. Latin had been part of the insane Hargreeves curriculum - Dad, ironically enough, had been big on Humanities - and Luther knows the quote. Knows it very well indeed. 

“Yup. You game, Seneca?”

Five glances down at his empty cup, lobs it smartly into the next trash can. Then he turns again to where Luther had pointed him, and signals for Luther to put his hand on Five’s shoulder once more. Luther does, and braces himself for their next jaunt. But as he does, he is smiling. 

“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gah! This chapter was getting too long in the end, so I'm splitting it in two. Apparently I have a thing for Luther and Five bonding at a fun fair. Also dramatic irony is fun to write. If you are still and faithfully subscribing despite my crawling updates, THANK YOU. You deserve tea and cake and an extra-fluffy teddy bear!

If, in days still to come, a Pulitzer-thirsty young writer opts to dedicate his time and effort to _The City: A Biography_ , here’s what they’ll find. The City is bipolar. It is a thing of sun, balloons and hot-dog stands; of fresh doughnuts soft and birthday-friendly bowling lanes, all crying “Come and live the apple-pie life!”. Also, it’s a den of inequities. Elected with Sir Reginald Hargreeves’ customary flair as a breeding ground due to its top-of-the-chart air quality and bank robberies. If our aspiring writer is old enough to remember the vintage Hardy Boys series, they may be tempted to compare the City to Bayport, another good ole Jekyllville (ah, the scent of Aunt Gertrude’s chocolate fudge cake!) and Hydetown. 

The City Game Park, thankfully, is the good stuff. The Hargreeves Boys never solved any mysteries in it, but it ranked among their top beeline trips, whenever Dad was away and Pogo thoughtfully hid the house masterkey in plain view. It hasn’t changed - much. Luther buys Five a Sunkist for old times’ and caffeine’s sake; hears his wistful groan; doesn’t inform him that the acid and benzoate ratios have gone up the roof since the day he left.

But the sun is still bright, no Yellow 6 involved. The grass is green, and Luther is no less embarrassed to win an oversized bear at the ring toss than he was at the age of twelve.

“You gave it to Klaus,” Five reminisces under his new orange mustache. “After you tried to barter it for that tacky vanity case Allison rumored for herself anyway.” 

“Yeah, well, I might keep this one for company. You know. Two of a kind.”

He didn’t mean anything by it, but Five, honed by the Commission to find a double edge in the littlest comma, stops and looks at Luther, _sharp_. He’s got that tic in his mouth corner that’s usually fed by Diego dashing off east when Five points west, that Luther knows is pique and concern in equal parts.

In the next millisecond Five is pivoting, is heading, sharp strides, to a nearby shooting gallery with a red stall and a fashion parade of wooden ducks. These are two-dimensional ducks, way less finicky than Harold’s. Luther catches up in time to see Five snatch a gun and target the head duck.

“Luther,” he says under his breath. “I may be out of worlds to save, but I still have you idiots to keep in one piece, courtesy now extended to my brother’s brother. Or sister. I’ll find them. I’ll find them if I have to comb every timeline from A to Z, as sure as...”

With that he adjusts the rifle, narrows an eye and fires a pellet right past his bird.

“What the flying -”

“Duck,” Luther cuts in. The Game Park, again, is on the light side of the Force. A family resort.

“Better luck next time, kid!” 

That’s the carny’s takeaway. Not Five’s, who picks up a pellet and rolls the crumb of metal between finger and thumb with a connoisseur’s frown. Next thing they know, he has broken the barrel, peered into the magazine, and turned his cold, unforgiving squint onto the gun’s rightful owner.

“What’s. The air. Pressure?”

“Uh…”

“And the top of the day to you,” Luther says brightly, before he drags the sharpshooter away. “They’re rigged,” he adds for Five’s private benefit. 

“No, they’re not. Diego always scored when we were kids.”

“Diego. Yes.”

… Five pauses, struck by lightbulb. “ _Oh_.”

Luther laughs, but under the laugh is a pang of understanding. Five still lives torn between two timescapes, now and the age of innocence he’s magnified all through his forty-year dry period. When a tween, he scorned tweenhood. Always a step ahead in training, growing, later, in surviving. Couldn’t stand the thought of faffing about - something to do with his power, Luther thinks. But once he was stuck in that waste land, and in later in corporate slaughter, he clung to that handful of childhood scenes as the one undamaged part of him. 

Luther’s been there too. 

So he begins to talk again. Of anything that will blanket Five in the warmth of recalling. How poor Ben couldn’t even look at the roller coasters but Klaus loved the stupid ghost train and never once kept his arms and legs inside the car as stipulated. How Allison tried to rumor the candyfloss purple. How they brought Vanya once and she wanted her fortune told by some torso plastic chick in a box, and the little paper said _“...!”_ , which, okay, kinda deep in retrospect. He buys them hot dogs and only winces slightly when Five answers the cart lady’s coy “Such a nice dad!” with “I do my best”. He yeets another unfortunate puck. He heaps stupid dares on Five the way he used to heap barbells in training, and Five picks all of them, saying “I can teleport, Luther, how’s a bungee jump supposed to scare me?” or “Try eating cockroach on the run” with a coolier-than-thou smile that’s still better than his concerned tic. 

The City clocks are striking two when they exit, still on the giddy end of fun, and Luther says, “I’d better hit that shower. Don’t want to keep Vanya waiting.”

The smile smirkens up.

“Shut up,” Luther says, a habitual prey to self-consciousness. It strikes him that in all of the four hours he bumped along Five on the road of nostalgia, he’s only rarely thought of Allison. He does now, and it still hurts, but with an almost abstract soreness. She’s gone, and she can only come back a different woman, no longer sheltering from the harsh of life in the eternal sunnyland of might-have-been. She’s back to might-be, and it’s time he should follow suit.

“You jumbo gentleman caller, you.”

But Luther can hear the fondness, and flash it back. “Cheeky leprechaun.”

“King-size dolt.”

“Murder tot.”

“Omlet predator.”

“Li'l Ol' Donutsdoom.”

And they grin as one, the Venn intersection positively _cooing_. 

* * *

One shower, one shave, one mechanical attempt, squashed, to dab the cologne that was Dad’s before Luther adopted it in his teenage mimicry of all things Sir, one change of clothes and he is standing at Vanya’s door. The door is new to him. He never found the time to visit when he was still a front page hero, though he’d gone to her first concert, only to leave at the interval because she’d booked him an orchestra seat and even then he’d felt it a press-ganging, suffocating experience. His apology call had been short and winceworthy (“You were the one dressed in black, right?” - “Luther, the entire orchestra wore black. It’s, it’s an orchestra thing.”). She’d answered with a book.

Now the door opens and Vanya stands before him, her arms hanging at her side, her face both flushed and expectant. 

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” he says, her tone his cue.

They smile and hover, each toeing the line between glad and gauche. “I like the bear,” she segues tentatively, at which point Luther realizes that he’s still holding his fluffy giant sidekick like an embodied _I can be gentle too_. 

(Swallow. Breathe, BREATHE, hold out.)

“Here. From Five and I.”

“Yes, he, uh, he dropped in this morning.” Vanya, her arms full of bear, waves a small hand to let him in as she leads the way to her living-room. It’s less oaky and flowery than Harold’s. It has honey-white walls holding the light in their arms and a chimney, and it sort of reflects on Vanya or rather the image Vanya had of herself before she grew into her own. But it has Vanya’s _sotto_ sweetness, too, that no turmoil of self could erase. Luther loves it on the spot.

He is careful when lowering himself on her couch (the bear gets a pouf), and he is careful when wrapping his fingers around the mug of tea she offers him. She’s prepared them a treat, he can see - and when she comes back with a cake, slightly burnt at the edges, his own eyes burn a little wet. 

“Oh, is it too hot? I can -”

“No. No, it’s good. Good tea.” They smile, and he looks around himself. “Nice place.”

“Everyone seems to think so, lately.”

Suddenly, it becomes vastly, vibrantly significant that she should see him as part of _everyone_ \- though he isn’t quite sure if the significance grates or soothes. The silence stretches like a cat, not uncosy. They both say “So” at the same time and “Oh” right after that, as if they’d bumped heads.

“Sorry, I -”

“No, no, go ahead.”

“No, you go ahead.”

“So,” she tries again. “What was it you wanted to ask me?”

Luther stares at her, shocked-eyed, until they bump words again, the two of them getting it in synch. “ _Five_.”

“That asshole,” Luther adds feelingly.

“Such an asshole!” (But she is smiling.)

“But it’s all right with you? That I’m here?” Luther asks, all too aware of the way his bulk commandeers her space. “Because I can still go, just say the word and -”

“Hush,” says Vanya, still smiling. “I’d like very much for you to stay.”

He abandons his weight to the relief, just a little, the sofa creaking under his back. 

“Good. I need to apologize, anyway. For yesterday. I got it for you, Dad’s book, but then I got sidetracked. By the book. It’s complicated. Anyway what I mean is, I never meant to turn my back on you - again.”

There it is, he thinks. The other elephant in the room. But Vanya simply looks at him and says, “I know. Five explained when he came by with the book. It’s okay, Luther - we’ve parsed anything that could help with me. There wasn’t that much. He, Dad, he stopped my training too early on. But there was some stuff about my medication and my violin, too. Did you know he’d given it to me?”

The violin in its case, is propped up on a nearby chair. Luther’s gaze drifts to it in wonder and a little fear. He remembers how she played it with nihilistic abandon that night, only pausing to sweep a lethal half-circle with her bow. But he remembers, too, how its music had grabbed him to the quick (and everyone else) right before, how sharp and pure each note had felt to his ear before he’d shaken it off and rallied his troops.

“You played from the heart,” he tells her. “You always have.”

“He says, in his journal, he’d envisaged sensory deprivation. He’d…” Vanya closes her eyes briefly. “He’d envisaged deafness. Permanent. For me.”

Luther wants to answer with a thrust of his body across the table, arms first; holds it back almost forcibly. He hasn’t earned it yet.

“But deaf people can still feel vibrations. Better that I should go gently into music, then, view it only as a finite skill, a… a discipline. I think…” A long, shuddered breath. “I think he undervalued me.”

“We all did. I did.”

“No. No, you didn’t. You always clapped when… I used to play when you all returned from missions, remember? Allison called me today, we spoke about it.”

“She did? That’s good.” A minor part of Luther wonders if Allison left any message, but the sum of him is with Vanya, is at Vanya’s side in her faltering quest for wholeness. “Yeah, I remember. We’d file into the house for a shower, all zonked out and - yeah. And your violin would be there. Meet us in the corridor. You always played that Bach thing, the one that felt like elves doing triple jump.” She says “Hrmm”, a husky little gurgle, and he grins. “Come on, you know what I mean. Hop, skip, jump, and again. And they’re doing it under the rain, but it’s a light rain, a happy rain.”

She’s giggling now, the happiness on her face, same as when she trained with them yesterday. And he put it there. Something in Luther breaks and exults at the same time. 

“I should have clapped more,” he tells her. “Should have dropped the silly records and told the others, forget Tiffany, let’s go dance at Vanya’s. So many things I should have done, Vanya, but it’s not too late.”

“I was happy playing for you all,” she says. “And when I auditioned for First Chair, that's when I played with everything I had, everything I was, and it made a change. I saw it. It’s what I cling to now, that my power can touch things and leave them _more_ , not less, not rubble. It made me more, when I was left alone. When…” She halts, and that’s when Luther feels it, that other power in him, which he now suspects came into being when he was born half of two, the ability to find and word what she can’t, only because it echoes his own past experience.

“ _When I woke up and my left hand was holding my right under the pillow_.”

She stares at him, hard-soft, her mouth open. “How did you…”

He hesitates, then he leans forward and places his hands, palms up, on the edge of the coffee table.

“It was poetry with me,” he tells her. “On the moon. I didn’t think anyone would ever hear me, but I still wrote - poems, yeah, because…” Because language, human language, evolves in a relative disorder and a relative mess, but poetry gave Luther the solace of words made balanced, made clear, made chiselled and pure and as perfectly pared down as Luther’s body had once been. He’d scribbled them with his mittened paw, now offered up on a coffee table, and he’d felt the same joy as she had when her ordinary hand had taken up her bow and unlocked that elfland.

“Where are they now?”

“The poems? Oh… still down under Dad’s floor, I guess. I wrote him some - because why not? Don’t laugh.”

“Because why not.”

“Some I just memorized. There was one about your music - well, about all of us. I woke up, and I was holding my own hand, and it was either putting it to writing or going mad. A for real lunatic."

“Tell it now," she says. "The poem. Tell it to me.”

“Oh, well, I didn’t mean…”

“Luthier. Please. Tell me?”

He almost doesn’t. What was poised and pure miles and months from home may very well prove ungainly now he’s back on Earth. But then, he thinks, he wants forgiveness. And if she is to give, shouldn’t it be a trade-off? He can’t change either of their pasts. But if he can help her back to music with his words, insufficient as they are...

The poem, he doesn’t tell her, is in elegiac couplets. He wrote it on one of the nightly mornings, after he’d watched the sun rise and the orange and green airglow fade away from the horizon. Luther never titled it.

_1\. You stabbed your goodbye note to my sandbags -_

_"The sand is run," yesterday brags._

_2\. This comet's hair is bright-dark, black and or -_

_I hear it rumor space into splendor._

_3\. You'd hate the waffles here - hot-pressed soy paste -_

_Now sing-song for me: "Luther, the_ taste _!"_

_4; My brothers gone, here is all night all day -_

_I'm so sorry I cannot light your way._

_5\. I house all of your tunes here in my lonely ear -_

_I wish I'd heard, I wish I'd heard, my dear._

When the last word falls, it leaves a ring at the surface of silence, one that widens from him to her. Luther doesn’t look up; and that’s how he sees first, sees her pushing her hands across the tabletop to cover each of his fingertips with hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Luther's elegiac couplets were originally written to fill a 5 + 1 prompt, hence the format. The +1 was Five's belated answer, suggesting that the couplets _had_ reached their addressees:
> 
> Congrats on turning home into Salt Lake City -  
> Come ASAP. Bring Kleenex and coffee.


End file.
